Roger Angell (born September 19, 1920), is an important figure in the world of American letters, having spent the vast majority of his career as a fiction editor and regular contributor at The New Yorker. He has written many memorable essays on baseball as well as numerous fiction, non-fiction and criticism pieces. Angell has been called "the best baseball writer ever" for his stylish, intelligent prose.

Angell is the son of editor and author Katharine Sergeant Angell White and the stepson of renowned essayist E. B. White.

Essays and books

Angell's earliest published works were pieces of short fiction and personal narratives. He first wrote professionally about baseball in 1962, when he was invited by The New Yorker — where his mother Katherine S. White and stepfather E. B. White were editors, from the 1920s through the 1970s — to travel to Florida to write a few pieces about spring training.

Since then, Angell has translated a lifetime passion for baseball into a steady stream of elegantly written essays, most of which were originally published in The New Yorker, where he has worked as an editor since 1956. Many of these essays have been collected in a series of critically acclaimed, best-selling books:

• The Summer Game (1972, ISBN 0-670-68164-4)
• Five Seasons (1977, ISBN 0-671-22743-2)
• Late Innings (1982, ISBN 0-671-42567-6)
• Season Ticket (1988, ISBN 0-395-38165-7)
• Once More Around the Park (1991, ISBN 0-345-36737-5)
• Game Time, edited by Steve Kettmann, with an introduction by Richard Ford (2003, ISBN 0-15-601387-8)
• Let Me Finish (2006, ISBN 0-15-101350-0)

Sources

• Eschholz, Paul; and Alfred Rosa (eds.) (2002). Subjects/Strategies: A Writer's Reader, 9th ed., Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's. ISBN 0-312-39109-9. 

Links

• "Iwo Mission," by Roger Angell, which first appeared in The New Yorker magazine, January 6, 1945.

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